


Thirsty

by marauder_in_warblerland



Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-03-31 23:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3996676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauder_in_warblerland/pseuds/marauder_in_warblerland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kurt discovers (and misuses) the perfect metaphor for consent. Set early in season three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirsty

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my wonderful tchrgleek for the beta! 
> 
> Inspired by this video from Blue Seat Studios: https://vimeo.com/126553913
> 
> If that video is not accessible for you, this blog entry includes the script and an explanation: http://rockstardinosaurpirateprincess.com/2015/03/02/consent-not-actually-that-complicated

Technically, it was all Rachel’s fault. Although Kurt could probably find a reason or two for why everything in his life was eventually Rachel’s fault. This time, it could also have been construed as Finn’s fault, but Rachel was really at the center of the action.

The two of them came barreling into the choir room barely a week into Kurt’s senior year. Or rather, Rachel came barreling into the choir room, open laptop in hand, and Finn arrived in her wake.

“We have to watch this together,” she announced, dumping her laptop onto an open chair and turning to face the rest of the room. Blaine was out recovering from a lingering cold, but everyone else was already there, strung out on vending machine sugar and getting twitchier by the minute. “This video is actually mind blowing.”

“Rachel, you say that about kitten videos,” Artie said.

“Only when the kitten video in question is particularly noteworthy.”

“And the last time I took your advice about YouTube I ended up watching a video of Patti LuPone blowing her nose . . . on repeat.” Mercedes shuddered. Brit turned to pat her on the shoulder in sympathy.

“That was different.” Rachel rolled her eyes as she set up a video to play. “Clearly, I wasn’t thinking about the proper audience who could appreciate that video, but this is perfect.”

Santana snorted. “Perfect for hobbit folk, or have you taken the rest of us into consideration?”

“Oh, did you already start?” Finn finally arrived, looking like Rachel just lapped him around the school and back again.

“Yes, Oh Lord of the Doughboys,” Santana smiled, “because she isn’t forced to drag your massive carcass across the earth for all eternity. Plus, your girl here absolutely had to show us some super important lady tips for those days when the hair down there just won’t--”

She gestured down toward the lady bits in question and Finn grimaced. “Ew! Don’t—I know the video sounds lame, but I saw it and it really is—” He paused and blinked up and the ceiling. “I mean, I’m still kinda confused by the whole point of it, but it’s really cool and— just watch it, okay?”

Kurt turned to watch as Rachel hit play on vimeo and the words [“Consent. It’s simple as tea.” ](https://vimeo.com/126553913)Appeared on the screen. Oh _God, what was he getting himself into?_

The basic premise was simple, as the video announcer explained, “Just imagine, instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.” Just like someone might want a cup of tea on Saturday, but not on Tuesday, just because someone has wanted sex before doesn’t mean they will always want it or ever want it again. Most importantly, if they decide that they don’t want tea, “don’t make them drink it.”

It was simple and cute, and vaguely horrifying.

As the video ended, a silence fell over the choir room. Rachel stood, wearing a very satisfied smile. “See? I’ve always spoken for the value of healthy communication—”

“And lord knows you could use some tea,” Santana said, and the room exploded in laugher. “Are you in favor of a specific brand of tea or do you just want us to say fuck yeah to a little after hours caffeination?” She crossed one leg over the other as Rachel sputtered.

“Hey, dudes.” Puck called over the din. “Berry has a point. Sometimes chicks get all weird about being into sex, but they have no problem saying that they’re into tea. Tea is like chick kryptonite. If that video gets them to embrace sex as loudly as they get into their oolong, I’m all for it.”

“I like tea too,” Mike said under his breath.

Tina smiled and grabbed his arm, “oh, I know. Me too, particularly when it has a little spice.”

She kissed him on the cheek and he pulled away. “No, not like that. I mean I just really like tea. It’s delicious.”

“I just don’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to have tea while they’re asleep.” Brit shrugged. “That’s when Lord Tubbington makes my Earl Grey and I don’t even know I’m drinking it.”

Quinn frowned.

“But what happens if I don’t want tea, like, ever?” Finn squinted down at his hands where he would, theoretically hold a cup. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“I think that would make you asexual,” Quinn shrugged. “So no. It just means that tea isn’t something you’re into. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Finn’s eyes went wide. “But I’m not asexual! I am definitely, definitely sexual. At least, I always thought that I was sexual, but maybe not. I have never actually wanted tea even though people keep telling me that I should like it.”

“Oh for goodness sake.” Mercedes called from the back row. “Finn, you are not asexual. You just don’t like tea.” Finn raised a hand to interrupt and she shot him a glare. “No. Don’t even say it. It’s. A. Metaphor.”

Tina sighed. “I could really go for some tea right about now.”

Artie raised his hand for a high five. “Amen, sister.”

Kurt didn’t say anything. In the insanity of the room, he was easily ignored until Mr. Schuester came back and tried to regain control. It wasn’t that he didn’t have thoughts about the video. He did. In fact, he had a few too many thoughts and all of them were too private to be shared in the McKinley choir room. Even watching it next to Santana and Puck felt more than a little invasive.

It wasn’t even that Kurt hadn’t thought about sex. Hell, he’d thought about sex with Blaine a few dozen times since he’d woken up that morning. He definitely thought about sex a million times more often than he would like, but he didn’t usually think about it like this, like he might think about what he wanted for dinner or what he was going to order at the Lima Bean. He hadn’t really thought about it as normal.

That’s what tea was though, wasn’t it? It was utterly and undeniably normal. Wanting tea was normal. Not wanting tea was normal. Even wanting tea in a very particular way, like only with certain leaves and the right amount of sugar, didn’t seem entirely out of the ordinary. Now why, he thought as he drove home from school, couldn’t he think about sex like that? It made sense in theory; sometimes you might be in the mood for, perhaps, a particular sexual experience, and later you might not. Theoretically he was on board, but in practice?

He pulled up to his house, turned off the car, and just sat, breathing into the silence. It felt wrong. All of it felt wrong. When he knew in his bones that he wanted to try something with his boyfriend of _not a brief amount of time_ , he felt like a skeeze, one step removed from the men that catcalled Brit and Santana outside of the movie theater. And when he didn’t want something? _God,_ that was even worse, because he felt like the same little, broken, prude that Blaine had tried to turn into a marginally normal sexual being. Why had they spent that evening making faces into a mirror or all these months taking things painfully slowly, if Kurt couldn’t even become the kind of man who desperately tried to get his boyfriend into the sack?

If he thought about the two things for long enough, tea on one side and sex on the other, it seemed like he might be able to pull them together in his mind. If he kept it up, he might even get them to overlap, and be able to say “fuck yeah” to a blow job just as easily as he might say “yes please” to an iced tea.

Maybe.

—————

So, Kurt thought about the video. He thought about it a lot. In fact, he might have thought about it a little too much, because the next night, when Blaine was feeling better and they were doing homework in his room, Kurt couldn’t get the damn thing out of his head.

When Blaine got up to change the music from Queen to the New York Dolls, he thought about tea. When Blaine asked if the room “felt a little stuffy to him?” he thought about tea, and when Blaine finally set aside his algebra and leaned over to where Kurt was lying against the headboard, with a needy look in his eyes that Kurt could have recognized from Mars, he thought about how much he was not in the mood for tea.

No. That isn’t right. He didn’t think it. He screamed it. When his boyfriend leaned over to give him what he was sure would have been a perfectly normal kiss, he reared back and said “I DON’T WANT TEA RIGHT NOW” in a tone somewhere between a marine drill sergeant and a terrified soccer mom.

When Blaine finally stopped scrambling backwards, he had practically fallen off of the other end of the bed. For one long minute, they stared at each other, hands gripping the sheets and eyes wide. Kurt didn’t think he’d ever seen Blaine look so confused and this was a boy who hadn’t realized that the GAP Attack might be a bad idea.

“Kurt?” he said, after a deep breath. “Are you okay? Did I do something wrong?”

Kurt looked up from where he’d been trying to drill a hole into the bed with only the power of his gaze, and the fear in Blaine’s eyes just about killed him. “No,” he said quietly. “No, you were fine. I was just . . .” He trailed off, and he could see as some of tension melted from Blaine’s shoulders.

“Oh . . . good. Then, um, do you think you could—” He paused and scooted back up, until he was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed. “I think I could use some context.”

Blaine dropped his chin into his hands, patiently waiting for whatever could possibly explain what had just happened, and Kurt’s heart throbbed with affection. _What had he done to deserve this boy?_ “Just a second,” he said, and slid off the bed to grab his laptop and pull up [the video](https://vimeo.com/126553913). He could only partially blame it—and Rachel— for the catastrophe, but it was certainly part of the story.

As Blaine watched the stick-figure cartoons tell the audience not to give tea to unconscious houseguests, his eyes slowly widened into something like recognition.

“Rachel showed it to us before Glee yesterday,” Kurt said, by way of explanation. “And I might have taken the message a little too seriously.” Kurt pulled a throw pillow into his lap and toyed with the fringe. This was the moment he’d been dreading, the moment when Blaine finally realized that he was dating a nutcase and headed for the hills. He tried to breathe.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Blaine said carefully, scooting in so that he could play with the other side of the same pillow. “It sound like you took the video exactly the way it was intended to be taken.” He caught Kurt’s eye, before they both looked back down at the pillow. “You know,” he said, “I don’t actually know what kind of . . . tea I like. I don’t know about you, because we haven’t really talked about it, but sometimes I feel like I’m only pretending to know what I want. Does that make sense?”

Kurt didn’t know what his face was doing, but he nodded. It made perfect sense.

Blaine cracked a little smile down at the pillow. “I’ve done some research into the kinds of tea that are out there and while it’s exciting it’s also kind of scary and overwhelming.” He took a deep gasp of air and released it in shaky breaths. “So, I guess I’m just trying to say that I would love to have tea with you, Kurt, someday, but that day doesn’t have to be today and it doesn’t have to be soon. I just hope that, at some point, we’re both— um—thirsty at the same time.”

Kurt caught Blaine’s eye again, through the tension, and he didn’t know who started it, but suddenly they were both laughing into their hands.

“Thirsty, Blaine, really?” Kurt giggled. “You hope I’m _thirsty_?”

“I don’t know!”

“THIRSTY.”

Blaine dropped his hands in indignation. “You’re the one who didn’t want tea. I was being sensitive!”

“Yes, yes you were.” Kurt’s smile softened. He dropped his hand over Blaine’s and gave it a squeeze. “I was a total weirdo and you were fantastic.”

Blaine grinned. “Well, if you’re a weirdo, then you are my weirdo, so that’s kind of in my job description.” He swung his legs off the side of the bed and held out his hand. “So, what do you say? Ready for a movie on the big TV downstairs? I don’t know about you, but this weirdo could use some quality time with Baz Luhrmann.”

“Strictly Ballroom?” Kurt took his hand.

“If you like.” Blaine shrugged.

He led the way down the stairs, and as Kurt watched him go, the butterflies gathered at the bottom of his stomach in a happy swarm. Someday they would have really awesome . . . tea, but for now there was Baz and cuddling and a boyfriend who was— _god_ — everything and more. “Fuck yeah.” Kurt thought. “Absolutely, fuck yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> Note: This fic includes two mildly ableist insults and one character's not-so-nice thoughts about himself. The author doesn't endorse either, and quite wishes that her characters would be nicer to themselves.


End file.
